Capitalism has done much to improve the world, but a certain dominance of corporations as part of capitalism has produced ill effects on family. Such an assessment of corporations would be unfair if we did not mention in the same breath the endless, fiat money printing happening in the United States. In this sense, my title for this article is too short. Nevertheless, the movement away from an agricultural-centric system, mixed with the growth and dominance of global markets, has diminished the solvency of the family unit.

That a husband in the 1950s could work to provide for his whole family while his wife stayed home does not address the absence of the father in a standard 9 to 5. Enter the fiat, non-gold-backed, money printing that happened in the 1970s and is still happening today. It is strange, isn’t it, that most primary or undergraduate courses on economics teach that a small amount of inflation in a monetary system is good? Why would we ever want to pay more? Let’s illustrate how money printing changes the value of that dollar in your hand. If there are 10 dollars in an economy, and that 10 dollars can buy 10 carrots, what happens when I print another dollar without something backing it, without value behind it? Each of those dollars now is only worth $0.91 rather than worth $1.00–the calculation is 10/11. The value of the carrots, however, is still the same. We now have to pay $10.98 for those carrots, nearly a 10% increase in what it costs me. The question is, has my pay at my job increased by that 10% during the same time period? Doubtful. What does this have to do with the decline of the family. If corporatism and 9-to-5-jobs took fathers away from families most of the day, then the fiat money printing system took mothers out of the home next. When one parent can’t make enough to provide for the family, there is one typical solution: the mother must work too.

The eye-opening question that comes to mind next is who is raising the kids if both parents are out of the home most of the time? There is no magic formula for putting in the time with the kids. Either you do or those intimate connections, influences, camaraderie, healthy rapport, and the like, with the kids decline. The single-parent family due to unnecessary divorce became fashionable in the latter half of the 20th century. This led to the unhappy dependence, for many families, on government: welfare, food stamps, or other government subsidizing. Dad or Mom are now displaced by government. Much of this was sold on the promise that we–those loving, caring politicians, despicable as most of them are, postured themselves as moral preachers for these causes–should just be there to help and to care; what has become potently obvious over the past 30 years is that government helping raise kids comes at a high cost. Firstly, this is the utter, systematic annihilation of the centrality of the family unit. Government displacing parents is every communist and totalitarian regime’s dream: i.e., Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, etc. If this decline in family isn’t abysmal enough, consider those dependent on the government programs in this way are nearly extorted–even if willingly–into continuing to support whatever politician will uphold the life-line.

“Follow your conscience” is a powerful tag line, but taking government subsidies to care for your kids likely eradicates every chance to follow conscience. What is, after all, a more conscience-able act than ensuring food is on the table for the little ones? The answer is obvious if we are brave enough to face it. The more conscience-able behavior would be to work out a living situation or work situation or marriage situation that enables the parent to be free from government and to actually follow his/her conscience. This brings us back to the title, what is it that corporations strain in the family unit that leads to this abysmal reality of government-dependence? Before we lay blame whole-sale on the corporations, it must be recognized that the influence of global markets and a trend towards transience as part of the American project was opportunity as much as it was a gut-punch to the family unit.

Strikingly, Karl Marx penned many complaints about global markets and the destruction of the community and niche-societal structures there contained in his now famous Communist Manifesto, written in the 19th century. His complaint wasn’t centered on the family unit; the concern with the family unit is instinctual in many respects, but the Abrahamic traditions–Christianity, Islam, Judaism–are or were particularly sensitive to protect the family. Marx targeted capitalism while we here explore the destructive effects of corporatism on the family unit. The truth is there might not be a solution to corporatism inasmuch as there is not a cure for the human craving of status and wealth. Capitalism falls prey to what every economic structure falls prey to: human greed or, more accurately, human-craving-recognition, the love of money. The question is how well does a economic system channel and keep greed from excess? Furthermore, how well does an economic system decentralize wealth and status?

Corporatism can take two faces: a drive to produce capital thoughtful of family units or a drive to produce capital for capital sake, whatever the cost. The former can only maintain its integrity while tied to a belief system that radically prioritizes and values others. The latter form of capitalism does not have resources in itself to place the other above self or corporation. It is the instinct to provide for the family, the so-called darwinism “survival of the fittest,” that removes all possibility of prioritizing others. It is a simple thought: the more money the corporation makes, the more money I bring home to the family, or at least I hope the corporation shares. Too bad it is the parent that the family needs far more than money. Money provides opportunity; a parent’s presence provides the character and training for a child to optimize opportunities. We can argue about which belief-systems actually uphold the inherent value of the other, but for now, we simply presume the death of the Christ on the Cross for humanity as an obvious belief that centers value on the other. Further, this death of God-incarnate to bring family into His fold is an interesting sharing of power; said differently, this is a decentralizing act for the sake of reunion.

The historic centrality of agriculture tied family-units both to the land and to one another. Communities were small, and resources were often locally sourced. The family unit strove together for food and for trade. There is hope on the horizon with the big uptick of both home-schooling and self-sufficient families. The next step is to broaden these into self-sufficient communities and then to begin bartering and trading with other self-contained sufficient communities. Sick of taxes? Barter. Sick of paying uncle Sam, set up local trade. Simply solved, hard to enact. The goal is not to be separate, like the Essences in Qumran, isolated from the wickedness of the world. The task is to disengage the global currents and controlled markets in order to reestablish the primacy of the family. Corporatism as it now slides deeper and deeper into entrenched secularism simply does not have any resources for elevating the importance of others, and families. Corporations will always offer a bit of self-proclaimed victory in caring for others by providing their product and providing jobs/livelihoods. This is not unimportant and credit should be given. Better to have jobs than anarchy. The test of being other-centered, or family-centered, only comes when a corporation stands to lose considerable and extended revenues from prioritizing families. We might object and state that we would not want to invest in said company since shareholders need a deep and unmoving commitment from the corporation to generate and prioritize profits. This highlights how the corporate-finance-systems likewise devalue the importance of family. Before I start sounding like a snob, I do not claim to know of better investment mechanisms that are similar in structure. What I can wonder about, however, is what the world would become if we invested in our families like we invest in our 401ks, or if we invested in our families like we dedicate ourselves to our corporate jobs? This might be a city on a distant hill, but its distance away doesn’t make it unattainable or undesirable. And, yes, I work a corporate job. I am not just some academician protected from what I speak here; I endure such trials and decisions daily.

Prime Theologian